If you have attended a Major League Baseball game in the last 15 years, pregame infield practice, known simply as infield, may be unfamiliar. All but abandoned by the early 2000s, the ritual lives on at the C.W.S. and at college stadiums all over the country. On Monday night, the routine will be repeated before Virginia takes on Vanderbilt in the first game of the finals.
Fungo bats are typically only used by coaches, to consistently place grounders and pop flies to their fielders for practice purposes. And with a fungo bat in their hands, some coaches can pull off wicked accuracy – as one story goes, the late California Angels player and coach Jimmie Reese once shot an 82 on an 18-hole golf course using nothing but a putter and a fungo bat.
The right baseball equipment can help players pitch, hit, field, and run to the best of their abilities. Whether you’re a coach or a proud parent of an aspiring baseball player, you have come to the right place. Anthem Sports is the most reliable source for coaches, athletic directors, and physical educators that want to set their students and players up for success by investing in the best equipment.
The most obvious reasons to utilize a fungo bat is the fact that it’s lightweight. It’s handy to coaches when conducting fielding practice since he or she has to hit plenty of balls to warm up his or her players. What is for sure is that hitting countless balls during practice can be tiring. Consequently, having a bat that’s lighter weight is magical at preventing the coach and/or players from getting tired.
A fungo bat's size and weight make it easier to operate with one hand or two. Coaches can toss a ball up with one hand and hit pop flies or ground balls farther and with greater accuracy with a fungo bat than with a regular bat. According to an article by LJWorld, high school baseball coach Brad Stoll said fungo bats allow him to hit more balls because heavier regular bats would "wear you out." Fungo bats should be used as a practice tool only and should not be used to hit a pitched ball.
To practice throwing around the infield, Bates recommends several drills you can use. The first involves placing four fielders in a square, about 15 feet apart. The players flip the ball underhanded to each other, like in a double play. Keep their arms straight, using a stiff wrist, with gloves on their hips once the ball is out. Every fielder follows their flip, glove side first, rotating around the square. The idea is to have a sequence of catch, flip and follow. The ball should be caught with two hands, palms open. After about two minutes, repeat the process rotating the other way for another two minutes.

Even in those formative years, authorities on the game warned the practice of hitting fungoes should be limited to coaches. Henry Chadwick, one of baseball’s earliest proponents, claimed “The weakest batting is shown when the batsmen indulges in fungo hitting,” according to the Art of Batting. Others agreed that the practice was bad for training a batter’s reflexes: “While watching some of our freshmen practicing ‘fungo’ batting the other afternoon it occurred to me that it was about the worst kind of practice a batsman could imagine in training his eye in batting,” a writer claimed in the March 3, 1886 edition of The Sporting Life. “It trains the eye to meet the ball in batting it in a manner which never occurs in actual play. It ought to be prohibited on every well regulated ball field.”